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including her, suggests his potential greatness had he lived in a free society—meaning, of course, all that he cannot become in Bolshevik Russia. Once free of tuberculosis, he sinks deeper into the criminal underworld and succumbs to alcoholism and despair. At the novel’s climax, he has become a gigolo, the paid companion of a florid, jewel-encrusted middle-aged Communist whore. For Rand, his character solves the riddle of the real-life Lev Bekkerman’s preference for mediocre women over her: both men opt for spiritual self-destruction in the absence of any other kind of personal choice. In writing We the Living, Rand discovers that, for her, this is an indefensible and unacceptable solution; upholding values, even in the airtight atmosphere of a dictatorship, is the only way to go on living. When Leo decides to return to the Crimea with his lusty paramour, Kira and Rand both let him go.

We the Living is Rand’s only novel to be set in Russia and the only one to portray a collectivist—meaning a Communist or a socialist—character, Andrei, sympathetically. In the future, anyone who barters individual rights for enhancement of “the state,” “the public,” or “the common good,” that is, who uses power to serve some men’s interests at the expense of others, will be a villain. It is also her only novel to end in tragedy. Leo gives up on himself. Andrei commits suicide. As to Kira, the girl who cannot be broken, she abandons her proximate dreams and dies of a gunshot wound while trying to crawl across the border to the West. Rand once told a friend that she, too, would have chanced death by walking to the border if the American consular officer at Riga had not let her board a train.

Over the years, We the Living has been revised and somewhat attenuated. She finished writing it in 1935. At the height of her fame in the late 1950s, perhaps mindful of her legend, she re-edited it and removed some of its shriller and less republican elements. She toned down her heroine’s cool indifference toward the masses. In the original edition, Andrei tells Kira, “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that you admire our [Bolshevik] ideals, but loathe our methods.” On the contrary, Kira responds, “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.” Her argument echoes the Nietzschean view that the lower social orders are often impediments to the advance of society’s Supermen, and, if necessary, need to be herded by their betters. By the 1950s, she had reconsidered and tempered this view. Conscious of the controversy over her approach to sex, she also muted the novel’s gauzy sadomasochism, excising a love scene in which Kira imagines that Leo is whipping her. Interestingly, at the same time, she subtly altered erotic encounters so that Kira and other female characters never initiate sex, as they often do in the original edition of the novel; by then she had formulated a strict hierarchy of sexual roles for her male and female protagonists. In spite of such revisions, there is no mistaking the strong bond between Kira’s active pride and her pleasure in being sexually dominated by her lover. This is man worship at the level of erotic arousal and suggests another, more personal, layer of Rand’s interest in power.

Touchingly, the mature writer didn’t disguise the many passages that pay tribute to her mentor, Victor Hugo—especially the long, lush description of the history of St. Petersburg at the beginning of part 2, which so closely resembles Hugo’s miniature essay on Paris in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Frank O’Connor recalled that, at the time she wrote the book, the St. Petersburg section was her favorite. That was then, she gamely answered him. In the intervening years, she had come to be proudest of the beautifully understated passage in which Andrei destroys his few reminders of Kira before putting a gun to his head.

In early 1935, as the novel was circulating